Who’s Blocking Drone Protest at Hancock AFB

By War Criminals Watch - Posted on 24 April 2012

33 people were grabbed by county sheriffs on April 22, a few blocks from the main gate of Hancock Air Force Base near Syracuse NY. Faster than you can say “parading without a permit,” people at the front of a single file, silent march along a mostly deserted suburban road, were cuffed and stuffed into police cruisers. Others were arrested standing near the gate of the base, where people do a protest vigil every two weeks, because pilots based at Hancock control drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) over the skies of Afghanistan, and perhaps over other countries in the region.

Given that we had just walked two miles in the Town of Dewitt, seeing people in only 3 yards, a total of 30 cars, and not one marked police car, one has to assume it wasn’t the good citizens of the town who were inconvenienced, annoyed, or even aware of the procession. Did the plan to stop our protest from arriving at the gate by arresting us before we got there come from the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Department? No, these arrests were ordered and planned at the federal level to preempt the delivery of a political message and to keep media from showing images of the group gathered by the gate.

If the operations out of Hancock are so legit, so clean, and clear of legal ambiguity; if they’re arousing no opposition, then why are the powers that be so afraid of 100 people gathering at the front gate to present some papers to any guard who would take them? The ordinances used against this protest are probably unconstitutional curbs on free speech and assembly, and perhaps they’ll be challenged in court by those ticketed and released.

But, to the substance of our charge that the U.S. drone programs, and the wars that underlie them, are illegitimate, unjust and immoral, what is the government’s answer? That we’re criminals for parading without a permit? While the 82nd Airborne units who posed with Afghan body parts are an aberration, and therefore not criminals? These lies are all they can come up with. They have no answer to the indictment we attempted to deliver but brutality and suppression.

We know these drones kill civilians; we know some of those civilians’ names, and that some were children. We know war crimes are being carried out in our name from inside the base, under the legal justification that the U.S. president can kill anyone, anywhere, because there is an limitless “war on terror.”

The Upstate Coalition to Ground the Drones and End the Wars did a similar action one year ago. 38 people stepped across a line to place themselves under arrest. At trial, they mounted a a thorough case, detailing the ways in which the U.S. drone war violates international law, and of course they were still found guilty. These actions, along with others at Creech AFB in Nevada, and recently at Whiteman AFB in Missouri, are bringing attention to the illegitimacy of the growing US deployment of drones to spread terror among the populations of whole countries.

Nick Mottern of "kNOw drones" with one of the model drones we hope to bring to the streets of Chicago in protest when NATO meets

Despite a President who orders their use, despite the hundreds of people keeping each drone aloft doing their”jobs,” we refuse to accept the horrors we are protesting. Seeing the government, at several levels, take such clear action to suppress our protest makes our point more strongly. The activists who have been bringing this message for years to Hancock, some of whom have been determined political opponents of U.S. crimes for decades; the Veterans for Peace, the crew of Occupiers from Buffalo, peace activists and students are informed and passionate, and they won’t stop.

Participating in the action at Hancock made me more certain that bringing visible street protest in Chicago when NATO meets May 20/21 — and in the week leading up to the meeting — is essential. The international press will be there. Afghan President Karzai will be there, along with the leaders of the best-armed countries of the world’s strongest military alliance, currently occupying the world’s poorest country.

Humanity and the planet come first – Stop the crimes of your government. Join us in Chicago.

Throughout class history, social principles have been co opted, corrupted, inverted and conflated into false social claims, i.e. SOCIAL BETRAYALS. They have no ability, means to stay indepdendent, indivisible, as social forces, instead ALL SOCIAL reforms have been at best, temporary, even dismantled completely, which is why social revolutionary liberals in the Enlightenment and socialists in the Post (class deformed) Enlightenment produced a social agenda that required the dismantling of class hierarchies linked to the MILLENIUMS,THOUSANDS OF YEARS, of class history, to produce a universal, social middle class that is linked to social wealth creation and social labor.

You can still find remnants of this social concept , from the Social Enlightenment of Western Europe and American revolutions, when Thomas Paine, and other social thinkers were not only opposed to Feudal class despotism, but all class despotism, calling for an end to class history, an end to class hierarchies, an end to Patriarchal class subordination by establishing an indepdent, universal, social, indivisible middle class with economic and political rights that were unified as one social principle. If you recite your PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE, the phrase "INDIVISIBLE WITH JUSTICE FOR ALL" is that social principle demanded by both revolutionary Liberals, and later the international socialists. An indivisible, independent middle class ASSUMES AN END TO CLASS HIERARCHIES, AND ITS PATRIARCHAL CLASS MECHANISM, still deforming HUMAN NATURE, still enslaving HUMANITY, once it established itself through the same class deforming functions of INVERSION, SUBSTITUTION, CO OPTION, GENERIC CORRUPTION, i.e. the ORWELLIAN CLASS PRINCIPLES which operates on both IGNORANCE, INANITY, AND ARROGANCE, THROUGH CLASS COMPROMISES, CLASS CORRUPTION, AND TOTALITARIAN PRINCIPLES:

Here is the proof, once again of such a DEFORMING, DEGENERATING CLASS PRINCIPLE INTO TOTALITARIANISM/FASCISM:

Tehran’s efforts to expand its circle of influence in South America is tantamount to exporting state-sponsored terrorism into the region, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said.....

Both the inanity and irony of this are so glaring as to be virtually self-evident. First there’s the fact that the U.S. has been “expanding its circle of influence” in Iran’s immediate vicinity — and in Iran itself — for roughly six decades now; indeed, the U.S., right this moment, has Iran almost entirely encircled militarily. For Iran to do anything comparable, it would have to not merely establish relationships with a few isolated South American governments, but would have to militarily occupy Canada and Mexico for more than a decade with a couple hundred thousand Revolutionary Guard troops, then station a huge naval fleet off the U.S. coast near, say, Cuba, and then target U.S. facilities with cyber-attacks and drone surveillance.

AS I HAVE SAID MANY TIMES, ALL CLASS PARTIES ARE EMPIRE PARTIES, ARE DEGENERATING INTO FASCISTS, THEIR CLASS COMPROMISES HAVE DRIFTED INTO THE FASCIST, TOTALITARIAN, FALSE CENTER, THROUGH ENDLESS FALSE CLAIMS TO CENTRISM. HERE IS ONE MORE EXAMPLE OF WESTERN FASCISM, THROUGH FASCIST ZIONISM:

What kind of person goes to college and demands to be shielded from political views they dislike?

"An Associate Professor at UCLA has been formally admonished for the crime of including a link on his course website to a political statement about Israel that some students dislike, as reported by The Daily Bruin:

David Shorter, an associate professor of world arts and cultures, was the subject of a late March complaint from an organization of University of California faculty that fights anti-Semitic sentiments on college campuses. The organization, AMCHA Initiative, decried that Shorter had linked his course website to a campaign calling for a boycott of Israel.

The chair of the Academic Senate responded to the complaint by saying that Shorter was counseled to not use the link again. But Shorter said he has not agreed to do so, and was only approached informally about the issue....

This is far from new. The widespread attempt in the U.S. to suppress and even sanction criticisms of Israel has long extended to academia. Neocons succeeded in blocking a tenure offer for Michigan Professor Juan Cole from Yale based on their dislike of his political positions on Israel. Alan Dershowitz did the same thing, for the same reasons, to Israel critic Norman Finkelstein at DePaul University. Professors at Columbia, mostly Arab, have long been accused of anti-Semitism, and have even been the subject of formal complaints, for their views on Israel. The UCLA complaint goes a bit beyond those incidents because it seeks to penalize a Professor for nothing more than a link on his website and out-of-classroom advocacy...."

YES LIBERALISM HAS DEGENERATED INTO SUPPORT FOR FASCIST ZIONISM AND FASCIST U.S. EMPIRE, FASCIST NATO ALLIANCES, I.E. WESTERN FASCISM. OBAMA LOVES FASCISM IN ISRAEL, LOVES RACISM IN ISRAEL, BECAUSE HE AND CONGRESS HAVE DEGENERATED INTO FASCIST, IDEOLOGICAL THUGS, AND TOTALITARIAN POLICY MAKERS.

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